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where the deed was done; let him know it with your knowledge, and fear it with your dread. Tell him of the letter you burned, and of the words no fire can destroy which are living in your memory now. Let him see your mind as it was yesterday, when it roused your sinking faith in your own convictions, to look back on your life at sea, and to cherish the comforting remembrance that, in all your voyages, you had never fallen in with this ship. Let him see your mind as it is now, when the ship has got you at the turning-point of your new life, at the outset of your friendship with the one man of all men whom your father warned you to avoid. Think of those death-bed words, and whisper them in his ear, that he may think of them, too: ‘Hide yourself from him under an assumed name. Put the mountains and the seas between you; be ungrateful, be unforgiving; be all that is most repellent to your own gentler nature, rather than live under the same roof and breathe the same air with that man.’” So the tempter counseled. So, like a noisome exhalation from the father’s grave, the father’s influence rose and poisoned the mind of the son.

The sudden silence surprised Allan; he looked back drowsily over his shoulder. “Thinking again!” he exclaimed, with a weary yawn.

Midwinter stepped out from the shadow, and came nearer to Allan than he had come yet. “Yes,” he said, “thinking of the past and the future.”

“The past and the future?” repeated Allan, shifting himself comfortably into a new position. “For my part, I’m dumb about the past. It’s a sore subject with me: the past means the loss of the doctor’s boat. Let’s talk about the future. Have you been

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taking a practical view? as dear old Brock calls it. Have you been considering the next serious question that concerns us both when we get back to the hotel – the question of breakfast?”

After an instant’s hesitation, Midwinter took a step nearer. “I have been thinking of your future and mine,” he said; “I have been thinking of the time when your way in life and my way in life will be two ways instead of one.”

“Here’s the daybreak!” cried Allan. “Look up at the masts; they’re beginning to get clear again already. I beg your pardon. What were you saying?”

Midwinter made no reply. The struggle between the hereditary superstition that was driving him on, and the unconquerable affection for Allan that was holding him back, suspended the next words on his lips. He turned aside his face in speechless suffering. “Oh, my father!” he thought, “better have killed me on that day when I lay on your bosom, than have let me live for this.”

“What’s that about the future?” persisted Allan. “I was looking for the daylight; I didn’t hear.”

Midwinter controlled himself, and answered: “You have treated me with your usual kindness,” he said, “in planning to take me with you to Thorpe Ambrose. I think, on reflection, I had better not intrude myself where I am not known and not expected.” His voice faltered, and he stopped again. The more he shrank from it, the clearer the picture of the happy life that he was resigning rose on his mind.

Allan’s thoughts instantly reverted to the mystification about the new steward which he had practiced on his friend

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when they were consulting together in the cabin of the yacht. “Has he been turning it over in his mind?” wondered Allan; “and is he beginning at last to suspect the truth? I’ll try him. – Talk as much nonsense, my dear fellow, as you like,” he rejoined, “but don’t forget that you are engaged to see me established at Thorpe Ambrose, and to give me your opinion of the new steward.”

Midwinter suddenly stepped forward again, close to Allan. “I am not talking about your steward or your estate,” he burst out passionately; “I am talking about myself. Do you hear? Myself! I am not a fit companion for you. You don’t know who I am.” He drew back into the shadowy shelter of the bulwark as suddenly as he had come out from it. “O God! I can’t

tell him,” he said to himself, in a whisper.

For a moment, and for a moment only, Allan was surprised. “Not know who you are?” Even as he repeated the words, his easy goodhumor got the upper-hand again. He took up the whisky flask, and shook it significantly. “I say,” he resumed, “how much of the doctor’s medicine did you take while I was up in the mizzen-top?”

The light tone which he persisted in adopting stung Midwinter to the last pitch of exasperation. He came out again into the light, and stamped his foot angrily on the deck. “Listen to me!” he said. “You don’t know half the low things I have done in my lifetime. I have been a tradesman’s drudge; I have swept out the shop and put up the shutters; I have carried parcels through the street, and waited for my master’s money at his customers’ doors.”

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“I have never done anything half as useful,” returned Allan, composedly. “Dear old boy, what an industrious fellow you have been in your time!”

“I’ve been a vagabond and a blackguard in my time,” returned the other, fiercely; “I’ve been a street tumbler, a tramp, a gypsy’s boy! I’ve sung for half-pence with dancing dogs on the high-road! I’ve worn a foot-boy’s livery, and waited at table! I’ve been a common sailors’ cook, and a starving fisherman’s Jack-of-all-trades! What has a gentleman in your position in common with a man in mine? Can you take me into the society at Thorpe Ambrose? Why, my very name would be a reproach to you. Fancy the faces of your new neighbors when their footmen announce Ozias Midwinter and Allan Armadale in the same breath!” He burst into a harsh laugh, and repeated the two names again, with a scornful bitterness of emphasis which insisted pitilessly on the marked contrast between them.

Something in the sound of his laughter jarred painfully even on Allan’s easy nature. He raised himself on the deck and spoke seriously for the first time. “A joke’s a joke, Midwinter,” he said, “as long as you don’t carry it too far. I remember your saying something of the same sort to me once before when I was nursing you in Somersetshire. You forced me to ask you if I deserved to be kept at arms-length by you of all the people in the world. Don’t force me to say so again. Make as much fun of me as you please, old fellow, in any other way. That way hurts me.”

Simple as the words were, and simply as they had been spoken, they appeared to work an instant revolution in Midwinter’s mind. His impressible nature recoiled as from some

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sudden shock. Without a word of reply, he walked away by himself to the forward part of the ship. He sat down on some piled planks between the masts, and passed his hand over his head in a vacant, bewildered way. Though his father’s belief in fatality was his own belief once more – though there was no longer the shadow of a doubt in his mind that the woman whom Mr. Brock had met in Somersetshire, and the woman who had tried to destroy herself in London, were one and the same – though all the horror that mastered him when he first read the letter from Wildbad had now mastered him again, Allan’s appeal to their past experience of each other had come home to his heart, with a force more irresistible than the force of his superstition itself. In the strength of that very superstition, he now sought the pretext which might encourage him to sacrifice every less generous feeling to the one predominant dread of wounding the sympathies of his friend. “Why distress him?” he whispered to himself. “We are not the end here: there is the Woman behind us in the dark. Why resist him when the mischief’s done, and the caution comes too late? What is to be will be. What have I to do with the future? and what has he?”

He went back to Allan, sat down by his side, and took his hand. “Forgive me,” he said, gently; “I have hurt you for the last time.” Before it was possible to reply, he snatched up the whisky flask from the deck. “Come!” he exclaimed, with a sudden effort to match his friend’s cheerfulness, “you have been trying the doctor’s medicine, why shouldn’t I?”

Allan was delighted. “This is something like a change for the better,” he said; “Midwinter is himself again. Hark! there are the birds. Hail, smiling morn! smiling morn!” He sang the

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words of the glee in his old, cheerful voice, and clapped Midwinter on the shoulder in his old, hearty way. “How did you manage to clear your head of those confounded megrims? Do you know you were quite alarming about something happening to one or other of us before we were out of this ship?”

“Sheer nonsense!” returned Midwinter, contemptuously. “I don’t think my head has ever been quite right since that fever; I’ve got a bee in my bonnet, as they say in the North. Let’s talk of something else. About those people you have let the cottage to? I wonder whether the agent’s account of Major Milroy’s family is to be depended on? There might be another lady in the household besides his wife and his daughter.”

“Oho!” cried Allan, “you’re beginning to think of nymphs among the trees, and flirtations in the fruit-garden, are you? Another lady, eh? Suppose the major’s family circle won’t supply another? We shall have to spin that half-crown again, and toss up for which is to have the first chance with Miss Milroy.”

For once Midwinter spoke as lightly and carelessly as Allan himself. “No, no,” he said, “the major’s landlord has the first claim to the notice of the major’s daughter. I’ll retire into the background, and wait for the next lady who makes her appearance at Thorpe Ambrose.”

“Very good. I’ll have an address to the women of Norfolk posted in the park to that effect,” said Allan. “Are you particular to a shade about size or complexion? What’s your favorite age?”

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Midwinter trifled with his own superstition, as a man trifles with the loaded gun that may kill him, or with the savage animal that may maim him for life. He mentioned the age (as he had reckoned it himself) of the woman in the black gown and the red Paisley shawl.

“Five-and-thirty,” he said.

As the words passed his lips, his factitious spirits deserted him. He left his seat, impenetrably deaf to all Allan’s efforts at rallying him on his extraordinary answer, and resumed his restless pacing of the deck in dead silence. Once more the haunting thought which had gone to and fro with him in the hour of darkness went to and fro with him now in the hour of daylight.

Once more the conviction possessed itself of his mind that something was to happen to Allan or to himself before they left the wreck.

Minute by minute the light strengthened in the eastern sky; and the shadowy places on the deck of the timber-ship revealed their barren emptiness under the eye of day. As the breeze rose again, the sea began to murmur wakefully in the morning light. Even the cold bubbling of the broken water changed its cheerless note, and softened on the ear as the mellowing flood of daylight poured warm over it from the rising sun. Midwinter paused near the forward part of the ship, and recalled his wandering attention to the passing time. The cheering influences of the hour were round him, look where he might. The happy morning smile of the summer sky, so brightly merciful to the old and weary earth, lavished its all-embracing beauty even on the wreck. The dew

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that lay glittering on the inland fields lay glittering on the deck, and the worn and rusted rigging was gemmed as brightly as the fresh green leaves on shore. Insensibly, as he looked round, Midwinter’s thoughts reverted to the comrade who had shared with him the adventure of the night. He returned to the after-part of the ship, spoke to Allan as he advanced. Receiving no answer, he approached the recumbent figure and looked closer at it. Left to his own resources, Allan had let the fatigues of the night take their own way with him. His head had sunk back; his hat had fallen off; he lay stretched at full length on the deck of the timber-ship, deeply and peacefully asleep.

Midwinter resumed his walk; his mind lost in doubt; his own past thoughts seeming suddenly to have grown strange to him. How darkly his forebodings had distrusted the coming time, and how harmlessly that time had come! The sun was mounting in the heavens, the hour of release was drawing nearer and nearer, and of the two Armadales imprisoned in the fatal ship, one was sleeping away the weary time, and the other was quietly watching the growth of the new day.

The sun climbed higher; the hour wore on. With the latent distrust of the wreck which still clung to him, Midwinter looked inquiringly on either shore for signs of awakening human life. The land was still lonely. The smoke wreaths that were soon to rise from cottage chimneys had not risen yet.

After a moment’s thought he went back again to the afterpart of the vessel, to see if there might be a fisherman’s boat within hail astern of them. Absorbed for the moment by the new idea, he passed Allan hastily, after barely noticing that he

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still lay asleep. One step more would have brought him to the taffrail, when that step was suspended by a sound behind him, a sound like a faint groan. He turned, and looked at the sleeper on the deck. He knelt softly, and looked closer.

“It has come!” he whispered to himself. “Not to me – but to him.”

It had come, in the bright freshness of the morning; it had come, in the mystery and terror of a Dream. The face which Midwinter had last seen in perfect repose was now the distorted face of a suffering man. The perspiration stood thick on Allan’s forehead, and matted his curling hair. His partially opened eyes showed nothing but the white of the eyeball gleaming blindly. His outstretched hands scratched and struggled on the deck. From moment to moment he moaned and muttered helplessly; but the words that escaped him were lost in the grinding and gnashing of his teeth. There he lay – so near in the body to the friend who bent over him; so far away in the spirit, that the two might have been in different worlds – there he lay, with the morning sunshine on his face, in the torture of his dream.

One question, and one only, rose in the mind of the man who was looking at him. What had the fatality which had imprisoned him in the wreck decreed that he should see?

Had the treachery of Sleep opened the gates of the grave to that one of the two Armadales whom the other had kept in ignorance of the truth? Was the murder of the father revealing itself to the son – there, on the very spot where the crime had been committed – in the vision of a dream?

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With that question overshadowing all else in his mind, the son of the homicide knelt on the deck, and looked at the son of the man whom his father’s hand had slain.

The conflict between the sleeping body and the waking mind was strengthening every moment. The dreamer’s helpless groaning for deliverance grew louder; his hands raised themselves, and clutched at the empty air. Struggling with the all-mastering dread that still held him, Midwinter laid his hand gently on Allan’s forehead. Light as the touch was, there were mysterious sympathies in the dreaming man that answered it. His groaning ceased, and his hands dropped slowly. There was an instant of suspense and Midwinter looked closer. His breath just fluttered over the sleeper’s face. Before the next breath had risen to his lips, Allan suddenly sprang up on his knees – sprang up, as if the call of a trumpet had rung on his ear, awake in an instant.

“You have been dreaming,” said Midwinter, as the other looked at him wildly, in the first bewilderment of waking.

Allan’s eyes began to wander about the wreck, at first vacantly, then with a look of angry surprise. “Are we here still?” he said, as Midwinter helped him to his feet. “Whatever else I do on board this infernal ship,” he added, after a moment, “I won’t go to sleep again!”

As he said those words, his friend’s eyes searched his face in silent inquiry. They took a turn together on the deck.

“Tell me your dream,” said Midwinter, with a strange tone of suspicion in his voice, and a strange appearance of abruptness in his manner.

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